


pieces

by pipistrelle



Category: Critical Hit (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Season/Series 04, Season/Series 04 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 20:12:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10498632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: "If a soul is damaged, anything connected to that soul might also be damaged." Lesser-known consequences of the encounter with Spud.





	

In Whitestone the young Lady Kammis Rivendorn was taken strangely ill. In a crystal laboratory staffed by mages and attendants, she suddenly gasped and clutched at her chest, dropping a sensitive clairvoyant orb that smashed into pieces on the floor. Horrified assistants rushed towards her, but she held up a hand and they found themselves frozen in place. " _Get out_ ," she said in a voice with supernatural resonance, and everyone in the lab was shoved out the door by what felt like a gentle hurricane. The door locked itself behind them.

The Lady Rivendorn was sent for. There was doubt whether she would answer the summons, since it was common knowledge that she and her daughter had been quarreling over some issue related to Kammis' old traveling companions, but she came at once. She brought one of the chief mages and the chief healer with her, but none of them were able to open the door, which seemed to have been locked by a spell of Kammis' own devising and which prohibited teleportation.

After a quarter hour of fruitless spellwork, and as a final effort before summoning Master Rivendorn, Lady Rivendorn sent everyone out of earshot. The servants huddling at the end of the corridor saw her speak into the keyhole. The door swung inwards, and she stepped inside. The fastest of the guards darted forward in time to catch a glimpse of the scene before the door shut again; he claimed he saw Kammis on the floor, sobbing wretchedly into her knees, and her mother kneeling to hold her as she would a child.

The rumors spread wildly, compounded by the fact that Kammis teleported from the lab to her room and was not seen in polite society for nearly a week. She refused all of her eladrin maids and servants and would admit only the gnome woman who looked after her rooms. The gnome reported that Kammis barely ate or drank, and spent most of her time in trance, staring unseeing at the wall opposite her bed.

It was the biggest scandal Whitestone had experienced since the young master Orem's departure. Some claimed Kammis had been the victim of a magical assassination attempt; others claimed she had contracted an illness or been poisoned by her work materials, accidentally or deliberately; still others that an old wound from her adventuring days had been aggravated somehow. Her parents would say only that she needed rest.

Eventually she did reappear, looking worryingly pale but nonetheless composed, and the rumors died away or turned to other people. It soon became known that the Rivendorns wished the subject to be closed, and after that no more was said on the matter -- at least among the eladrin.

 

* * *

 

In a place that did not have a name (and was not even strictly speaking a place), the Baltinok paused.

The tortured screams of his latest quarry gurgled away into silence. The Baltinok did not seem to notice. The visible part of his face was made of unmoving bone, but nonetheless he gave the impression of flaring his nostrils and flicking out a forked tongue to scent the air.

A faint hissing sound, too small for his huge frame, vibrated from his throat.

"I felt it too, my lord," said the majordomo, blinking into existence in response to his master's summons. "Most concerning. Someone damaging one of your creatures sets a dangerous precedent."

An earth-shaking growl began deep in the Baltinok's coils and hurtled upwards in tone and volume, erupting from the skull as a scream wreathed in black flame.

"I agree, my lord. I shall investigate immediately. Certainly anyone powerful enough to harm Trelle would make excellent sport." The majordomo bowed. "I am certain he shall regret this day when he feels your magnificent claws rip apart his soul."

 

* * *

 

 The Hogba had been alone in his tent in the midnight silence of his army's camp; then he wished it to be dawn, and the dawn came at once. With it came noise and distraction, the bustle of cooking and mobilizing, and the crunch of footsteps as valets and lieutenants assembled outside the tent to learn their commander's will.

The Hogba shouldered his axe and stepped out to meet them. These were lean and black-furred, a little like panthers with many-jointed spider legs that narrowed to thin suction-capped pads. He had built them for stealth and silence, and had brought them on this mission to test their abilities. Somewhere in the next valley was a sleeping underground monster that could be surprised in its lair. They had been going to close the rest of the distance today.

"There has been a change," the Hogba announced. "Some things of mine have been stolen, or possibly destroyed. After we have rid the countryside of the scourge we face, I will send some of you to attempt to retrieve my possessions. Only the bravest and most skilled will be considered for this honor."

A murmur ran through the panther-beasts. Many of them lifted their tails a little higher, straightening their omnidirectional joints, attempting to appear brave and skilled.

The Hogba dismissed them with a wave of his hand. "Ready yourselves. In an hour we march."

 

* * *

 

The Golden Kind did not have thoughts. The Golden Kind did not have memory. Thought and memory were lost, replaced by the nameless, driving instinct that moved each one through the network of the whole. It was no great loss; the network was life, was greater than life.

The network did not suffer when three of the winged contingent of Wards suffered an unexplained malfunction. If they had been examined, it might have been determined that psychic energy they had absorbed in battle some time ago had suddenly, explosively detonated; but they were not examined. The Golden Kind had no concept of mystery. A disposal drone appeared and reclaimed the remains of the three unlucky ones, and the network continued.

The Golden Kind did not worry. If it did, it would have been worrying about a number of other things; it would never have assigned significance to such a miniscule loss.

 

* * *

 

The chapel of the Cerulean Academy was already beginning to change.

Emanating from an epicenter somewhere under the dome of vegetation, the patterns of magic and reality were shifting, unraveling and interlocking into new shapes. The change came like an earthquake, or like a birth; initial tremors, weak at first but growing stronger as they grew more frequent, building towards a crest that would remake everything. The light filtering into the dim vault of the nave grew dimmer, then brighter, then bluer as the world outside convulsed. Strangely, perhaps reinforced by its divine patron, the inside of the chapel resisted the change like the summit of a mountain that is the last thing to stand above a flood.

In that heartbeat of stillness, when the world was unmaking itself but this one place had not yet succumbed, the symbol of Corellon engraved into the side of the altar stone flared with a brief warm light.


End file.
